May 25, 2007

QUESTION: Abandon journalism, or become smaller and charge?

I helped start a company a number of years ago called Clickshare Service Corp., which provides a system which some have called micropayments, that makes it easy to have an account at one website and buy from other websites. But what we've found is the advertising model has been so durable and has grown so quickly on the net that there really is not a lot of interest, frankly, in adopting even a partially paid wall.

Print revenue is shrinking must faster in real dollars than their online revenue is increasing. And so the interesting question to me is: "Will advertising come along well enough to sustain the amount and quality of watchdog journalism that we having going on now? I don't really have any more insight than anybody else at this point. I think it's an open question. I think the trends are worrisome to me and to others. And so the question to me is at what point do folks say, "OK, I've grown my market enough with free, and I can see that even as much as I grow my market with free I'm never going to end up with enough revenue to do the kind of business I'm doing now."

Publishers are going to be faced with a decision, and the decision is going to be, "Do I abandon journalism, as I've known it, or do I become a much smaller business and a much smaller audience in order to support journalism?" Or, the other thing that has to happen is there has to be a change in the perception of the audience, or the former audience out there -- the participants -- that they are going to ante up and be willing to pay, as many have with some of the most successful public radio stations around the country.